Depression

Over the past few weeks (months?) I’ve been slowly becoming depressed again. I was aware of it this time, which is progress I suppose. I didn’t really do anything to try to stop it, but I did recognize it this time. Too bad that won’t spontaneously generate data for the seminar I have to give in three weeks.

Today was far and away the worst I’ve been. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t even want to play mindless computer games, which is something I usually do a lot of when depressed. This attitude dragged on all day, but I did manage to get into lab for a few hours and actually accomplish some things. (I’m still working on a conversion factor for when Duckling 1 tells me how long something is going to take her. I think things take about 1.75x longer than she tells me. Which is about 15x longer than they would take me.)

After lab, TM had gone to the grocery store and I was sitting here grousing. I was eating some cheesecake in the hopes that would make me feel better, but even cheesecake wasn’t cutting it. I finally made up my mind that I was tired of this, and got up and worked out. Even though I may have yelled obscenities at the TV while I was working out, I do feel better. Not great yet, but better. And that has been enough of a spark to make me want to make an effort. The hopeless feeling has abated! And I’m going to Lush this week! Here’s hoping I’m on the upswing again.

RBO Crazy

Crazy Man sent me an email this morning:

1. Have you resubmitted your paper yet? (Um, no. Here’s the revisions…you said you wanted to see the final changes.)
2. Can you and Duckling 2 write a grant? Send it to me by Friday. (Wait…what??? Friday, as in the day after tomorrow Friday? As in I have to give a talk and be at a symposium all day on Thursday and you want me to write a grant and get it to you by Friday? Is there any wonder why I call him crazy man???)*
3. Duckling 1 said you’ve been helping her a lot with (technique she isn’t done with safety training for). Thanks for that. (Well WTF did you expect me to do? Even though she can’t close the refrigerator or find the chemicals on the alphabetized shelf…)**

* I do tend to binge-write much like I binge-read. I like to be thinking about things for a while and have a general outline and then just sit at home in my pajamas and write the whole thing in one fell swoop. Or maybe more like 3 days of that for an R01. I can handle an R21 or shorter private society grant in one day, which is what this one is. Last time I did this I condensed a 12-pager (that I wrote in one sitting) down to 5 pages and got it funded. J I’ve been thinking about this one a good bit, and honestly, I’m pretty excited about trying to crank it out and have it be really good just to freak out Crazy Man. I think he expected me to tell him he was crazy. I almost did. But I’d rather write a grant than practice the talk I’m giving tomorrow. I think I may be as crazy as he is.

** Duckling 1 is another story for another day.

Target fail!

I went to Target today to pick up a few necessities. (You know, like 3 different kinds of shampoo. Seriously.) I meandered back towards the Halloween stuff to look for some fangs to complete my costume(Vampire Pam!!). First I passed a row of Christmas cards. IT’T NOT EVEN OCTOBER YET!!! We haven’t even gotten out the Halloween decorations yet! But whatever…one aisle of cards. Next aisle: what remains of the clearance school supplies next to WREATHS! CHRISTMAS WREATHS! NEXT TO SCHOOL SUPPLIES. And the whole back wall was Christmas lights. Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas, but seriously? It’s September. It’s not even really chilly yet. And what made me the maddest was that I couldn’t find any fangs. How can Target not have fangs for Halloween. Hmph. I was not pleased.

Oh glorious DivaCup!

mrswhatsit has an awesome post up about how much she loves her DivaCup. I too love love love love love my Diva. In fact, it may be the greatest thing ever! Check it out.

Oh, the drama: Happy Ending

After I had finished purifying cells on Wednesday (after being Golden Child's lab bitch on Tuesday), I came to my desk and there was a plate of cookies and a card. Duckling 2 made me cookies and gave me a thank you card to say that she appreciated all my help. I teared up a little. It didn’t solve any of the drama, it didn’t magically give me any more time to do my own experiments, but it did make me feel less used and abused, which made my whole day brighter.

Oh, the drama: Part 2

I had to spend a whole day this week taking care of the Golden Child’s crap. He’s out of the country, visiting the Golden Wife’s family. Which is fine. In theory. Except that he was gone for this same reason for the entire month of December, and now he’s gone another week plus. Not to mention the days he took off for the wedding. Sigh. That all ticks me off, since our graduate program handbook clearly says we get two weeks of vacation time. It dawned on me today that he’s taken more time off in the past calendar year than other FGS gets to take for maternity leave! Ugh!!!

But what’s even worse than the frivolous amount of time he’s taken off is the work he left for me to take care of. I don’t mind taking care of somebody’s cells while they’re on vacation. It’s typically not a big deal. The instructions he left me said that he has this one cell line he wants to scale up, so he asked me to plate up all the live cells I got back and said that it would probably be “a lot” of plates. It ended up being something like 70 24-well plates worth of cells. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but when I’m doing somebody else’s work, “a lot” is maybe 10 or 12. It’s definitely not 70. So I asked Crazy Man if I really needed to do all those plates and he just looked at me like it wasn’t a big deal. So I flipped out on him. Again. Sigh.

After all that, I finally made it back into the lab, and I had an email from the engineers…they wanted cells Thursday, in addition to the Wednesday and Friday ones I had already agreed to. I told Crazy Man that and again he gave me this attitude like it wasn’t a big deal. I got spectacularly pissed. And then I got over it. I still had slightly less than 70 plates of cells to deal with and it just wasn’t even worth my effort to yell at Crazy Man.

Oh, the drama: Part 1

I’ve had a pretty nasty couple of weeks. We’ve had all this drama with our collaborators about getting this paper out and getting scooped on paper number 2 so now we’re trying to get that one out and I have a big problem with the authorship on paper number 2 and it’s just been drama, drama, drama. Which is not so much fun.

It’s really been stressing me out because my part in this whole little scheme is to purify cells for the engineers to work their magic on. This process takes me about 2 hours and requires a transgenic/knockout mouse as the source of the cells. I’ve been purifying cells for these collaborators basically since I started in the lab. I usually do it once a week and we’re all happy. Now, because of aforementioned scoopage drama, they’re trying to do every conceivable experiment NOW. Which has translated into me purifying cells 3 times a week for the last three weeks. Needless to say, do not want.

What’s really getting ridiculous and why I’m getting progressively more upset about this is that most of the experiments don’t need to be included or could be added in response to reviewers if needed. Meaning there’s no reason for me to be spending 6 hours a week purifying cells.

The real reason I’m getting upset about what a chunk of my time this is taking is how the authorship has panned out. Last draft I saw I was fourth out of seven. That’s despite the fact that I purified every single cell used in every single assay (not to mention breeding and genotyping the mice). There’s one whole figure (of four) that is entirely my biological data. One of the people that’s ahead of me has been in the other lab literally a month. As far as I can tell the two people between the first author and me have contributed one line on one panel of one figure each. Crazy Man and I agreed when we discussed this. And yet he continues to be bullied by our collaborator. He’s not standing up for me, and that both pisses me off and hurts my feelings.